We examine risk-return trade-offs associated with “covlite” deals which lack systematic covenant compliance requirements of traditional “covheavy” deals. We document demand-driven risk taking incentives in the primary markets where covlite deal pricing has become increasingly...

Following Basu (1997), the excess of the sensitivity of accounting earnings to negative share return over its sensitivity to positive share return (the Basu coefficient) has been interpreted as an indicator of conditional accounting conservatism. Although this interpretation is supported by...

This study addresses whether firms' share prices correctly reflect two accounting measures, dirty surplus and really dirty surplus. Dirty surplus is readily observable from the financial statements, but really dirty surplus, which arises from recognizing equity transactions such as employee...